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LLM-driven Development: The Closed Loop Revolution

2025-02-15

LLM-driven Development: The Closed Loop Revolution

While LLM-driven development agents like Cursor boast only a 40% success rate, their potential is undeniable. This post explores the exciting prospect of closed-loop LLM code generation. By integrating LLMs with tools like Semgrep, developers can create systems that automatically debug code, generate unit tests, and even write security rules. This paradigm shift promises to drastically improve development efficiency and reshape the way we build software. The future may belong to those who master the art of harnessing these powerful models.

(fly.io)

Development

System Oscillation: From Thermostats to Software Documentation

2025-02-14

System Oscillation: From Thermostats to Software Documentation

This article explores common system oscillations, using thermostats and rabbit-hawk populations as examples to illustrate how delayed feedback leads to cyclical fluctuations. The author applies this model to the problem of software documentation, pointing out that excessive documentation becomes outdated over time, diminishing its value. In agile development, the author argues that good code, tests, and team communication can replace redundant documentation, while the advent of generative AI further addresses information retrieval, reducing reliance on outdated documentation.

(tidyfirst.substack.com)

Development systems theory

Tech Titans Hype AI's Transformative Power at Paris Summit

2025-02-14

Tech Titans Hype AI's Transformative Power at Paris Summit

At a recent Paris summit, tech CEOs made bold predictions about AI's transformative potential. Sundar Pichai of Alphabet called it the "most profound shift of our lifetimes," while Anthropic's Dario Amodei predicted the "largest change to the global labor market in human history." OpenAI's Sam Altman even suggested that within a decade, everyone could accomplish more than today's most impactful individuals. These pronouncements reflect immense confidence in AI, but also raise questions about its future direction and potential risks.

(www.economist.com)

AI Tech Summit Future Predictions

AI Voice Synthesis: Censorship and the Plight of ALS Patients

2025-02-14

AI Voice Synthesis: Censorship and the Plight of ALS Patients

Joyce, an ALS patient, was banned from ElevenLabs' AI voice synthesis service for a mildly complaining remark, sparking a debate about censorship. While reinstated, the incident highlights inconsistencies; other ALS users haven't faced similar scrutiny, and some platforms even encourage diverse voice samples. This underscores ethical and inclusivity challenges in AI applications.

(www.technologyreview.com)

AI voice synthesis

AI-Assisted Coding: Efficiency Gains and Hiring Challenges

2025-02-15

The author shares their experience using AI for coding, highlighting increased efficiency and reflecting on current flaws in software engineer recruitment. AI tools enabled the author to handle more complex code, improve code quality, and reduce tedious tasks. However, the author notes that some companies prohibit AI use during interviews, overlooking engineers' systemic thinking abilities. The author argues that recruitment should focus more on problem-solving skills and imagination, rather than rote memorization and retrieval. The article also discusses strategies for choosing primary keys in different databases and balancing development efficiency with data integrity.

(scott-fryxell.github.io)

Development

DOGE: An Unprecedented National Cyberattack

2025-02-13

A department called "DOGE" has gained unauthorized access to critical US government systems, including the Treasury Department, USAID, and the Office of Personnel Management. They obtained sensitive data, including trillions in federal payments, classified information, and personal data of millions of federal employees. This wasn't a sophisticated external hack, but an internal breach, unprecedented in its audacity and impact. While some access has been blocked, copied data and potential vulnerabilities remain. The situation poses a grave national security threat, demanding immediate action to restore system integrity and security protocols before irreversible damage occurs.

(www.schneier.com)

Tech

Senator Wyden's Bill to Rein in Foreign Surveillance Demands

2025-02-15

Senator Wyden's Bill to Rein in Foreign Surveillance Demands

Senator Ron Wyden released a draft bill, the Global Trust in American Online Services Act, to address flaws in the CLOUD Act that allow foreign governments to demand U.S. companies weaken the security of their services. The bill aims to prevent foreign governments from forcing companies to alter product designs, reduce security, or deliver malware. It also allows U.S. providers to challenge foreign orders in U.S. federal court and mandates Congressional approval for CLOUD Act agreements, replacing the current disapproval mechanism and adding a five-year sunset clause for oversight.

(www.wyden.senate.gov)

Tech CLOUD Act

Nvidia Delays RTX 5070, Setting the Stage for AMD's Radeon RX 9070 Showdown

2025-02-14

Nvidia Delays RTX 5070, Setting the Stage for AMD's Radeon RX 9070 Showdown

Nvidia's RTX 5070, boasting RTX 4090-level performance at $549, has been delayed from February to March 5th. This sets the stage for AMD's upcoming Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT launch on February 28th. AMD's strategy appears to focus on price competitiveness against Nvidia's RTX 4070 Ti and 4070 Super, rather than directly challenging the top-tier cards. However, Nvidia's substantial profits give it considerable leeway to respond. Rumors persist of a more powerful AMD card with 32GB of RAM, though this remains unconfirmed. The GPU battle heats up!

(www.theverge.com)

Hardware

NYC's Free E-bike Swap Program for Delivery Workers

2025-02-15

NYC's Free E-bike Swap Program for Delivery Workers

NYC's Department of Transportation is launching a free e-bike trade-in program for delivery workers. Workers who earned at least $1500 in 2024, reside in one of the five boroughs, and own a non-compliant e-bike or moped can exchange it for a new UL-certified e-bike with a spare battery. This initiative aims to improve safety for delivery workers often using uncertified, cheaper vehicles. The program has limited spots and will use a lottery system if applications exceed availability. The application deadline is March 10, 2025.

(electrek.co)

Misc e-bike safety delivery workers NYC DOT

ICE's Social Media Surveillance Sparks Controversy

2025-02-14

ICE's Social Media Surveillance Sparks Controversy

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plans to monitor and locate "negative" social media discussions about the agency and its officials, using a new contract. This move has raised concerns about free speech and privacy. While ICE claims it's a response to increased threats against its personnel and facilities, critics argue it could sweep up constitutionally protected speech. The contract may involve digging into users' personal information, including social security numbers and addresses. This follows ICE's previous use of federal contractors for large-scale social media surveillance, fueling concerns about government overreach.

(theintercept.com)

Tech Social Media Surveillance

Japan Launches World's First Hybrid Quantum Supercomputer

2025-02-15

Japan Launches World's First Hybrid Quantum Supercomputer

Japan has activated Reimei, the world's first operational hybrid quantum supercomputer, integrating a 20-qubit quantum computer with Fugaku, the world's sixth-fastest supercomputer. Reimei utilizes trapped-ion qubits and advanced error correction, addressing challenges in quantum computing stability and scalability. Primarily focused on physics and chemistry research, this breakthrough represents a significant advancement in high-performance computing, paving the way for future innovations.

(interestingengineering.com)

Tech supercomputer tech breakthrough

Oregon DA's Illegal Phone Search Leads to Privacy Violation Lawsuit

2025-02-14

Oregon DA's Illegal Phone Search Leads to Privacy Violation Lawsuit

An Oregon woman's nude photos became the talk of her small town after a prosecutor viewed her sensitive cellphone data without a warrant, consent, or suspicion of a crime. While a federal appeals court ruled the Grant County DA had qualified immunity, the case highlights a troubling Fourth Amendment violation. The court acknowledged the Idaho State Police had consent to search the phone, but that didn't extend to another state's DA reviewing the data and disseminating private photos. The ruling sparks criticism of qualified immunity's protection of officials from liability. Though the woman received no remedy, the case serves as a warning to law enforcement; similar actions violate the Constitution and could result in liability.

(www.oregonlive.com)

Misc privacy violation illegal search qualified immunity

Nanosensors Detect Pancreatic Cancer in Blood Tests

2025-02-13

Nanosensors Detect Pancreatic Cancer in Blood Tests

Researchers have developed a groundbreaking blood test using nanosensors to detect pancreatic cancer early. The test focuses on identifying active proteases, enzymes present even in the earliest stages of tumors. In a study of 356 individuals, the nanosensors achieved 98% accuracy in identifying healthy individuals and 73% accuracy in detecting pancreatic cancer, distinguishing it from other pancreatic diseases. This advance holds immense promise for improving early detection and treatment of pancreatic cancer, offering a lifeline to millions.

(www.nature.com)

Tech nanosensors pancreatic cancer early detection

VimLM: A Local LLM-Powered Coding Assistant for Vim

2025-02-15

VimLM: A Local LLM-Powered Coding Assistant for Vim

VimLM is a local LLM-powered coding companion for Vim, inspired by GitHub Copilot. It integrates contextual code understanding, summarization, and AI assistance directly into your Vim workflow. It's model-agnostic, using any MLX-compatible model, boasts a native Vim UX, and is entirely offline for enhanced security. Users interact via intuitive keybindings for tasks like code conversion, generation, and summarization, leveraging deep context understanding encompassing the current file, selections, referenced files, and project structure.

(github.com)

Development coding assistant

PIN AI: Your Personal AI, Under Your Control

2025-02-15

PIN AI: Your Personal AI, Under Your Control

PIN AI is a decentralized personal AI app that runs directly on your smartphone, challenging big tech's dominance over user data. Unlike cloud-based AI, PIN AI keeps your AI model on your device, ensuring privacy and customization. You own your data and control how your AI learns. Boasting over 2 million alpha users and backed by investors like a16z Crypto, PIN AI aims to create a user-centric AI ecosystem, empowering individuals to own and control their AI assistants, much like Iron Man's J.A.R.V.I.S.

(venturebeat.com)

AI decentralized AI personal AI

AI's Disruption of the $300B+ BPO Market

2025-02-14

AI's Disruption of the $300B+ BPO Market

The Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) market, valued at over $300 billion in 2024 and projected to exceed $525 billion by 2030, is ripe for disruption. Traditional BPOs, while crucial, suffer from slow turnaround times, human error, and context limitations. AI offers a powerful solution. Advanced AI models excel at tasks BPOs handle, from customer support to complex data processing. Startups are capitalizing on this by offering AI-powered agents that provide superior efficiency, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. This allows companies to bring customer experience and back-office operations in-house. While incumbent BPOs are adopting AI, innovative startups hold an advantage with their AI-native approach, focusing on clear ROI, customer-centric strategies, and full-stack solutions. The race is on to claim a piece of this massive market.

(a16z.com)

Startup

From Dead Inventory to Global Phenomenon: The Insane Story of Sport Stacking

2025-02-14

From Dead Inventory to Global Phenomenon: The Insane Story of Sport Stacking

A couple risked their life savings buying over 800 boxes of defective plastic cups from Hasbro. These cups, with holes drilled in their bottoms, seemed worthless. However, leveraging the father's clowning background and the mother's PR skills, they transformed cup stacking into a global phenomenon, reaching thousands of schools and building Speed Stacks, a multi-million dollar company that changed countless lives.

(defector.com)

Startup Sports

Configurable 3D-Printed Calendar in OpenSCAD: Zeller's Congruence and Beyond

2025-02-14

Configurable 3D-Printed Calendar in OpenSCAD: Zeller's Congruence and Beyond

A developer created a highly configurable 3D-printed calendar model using OpenSCAD. Leveraging Zeller's congruence for accurate day-of-week calculations, the model automatically adjusts date offsets. Users can customize rendered months, column layout, layer height, add custom holiday markings, and even include magnet holes. This project showcases OpenSCAD's power in algorithmic implementation and parametric modeling, supporting multilingual features and multi-material printing.

(chrastecky.dev)

Design Calendar

SUSE: From Four Students to a Public Company

2025-02-14

SUSE: From Four Students to a Public Company

In 1992, four German university students founded SUSE, initially focusing on localizing Slackware Linux into German. Fueled by passion and 100-hour workweeks, they sold CD-ROMs and floppies to fund the company, releasing their first SUSE Linux distribution in 1994. SUSE subsequently evolved, merging with Jurix, introducing the YaST installer and AutoBuild system, and partnering with IBM to enter the enterprise market. Navigating acquisitions, restructuring, and an IPO, SUSE ultimately became a globally recognized enterprise Linux powerhouse.

(www.abortretry.fail)

Tech

IRS Acquires Multi-Million Dollar AI Supercomputer: Efficiency Boost or Job Cuts?

2025-02-15

IRS Acquires Multi-Million Dollar AI Supercomputer: Efficiency Boost or Job Cuts?

The IRS is set to purchase a multi-million dollar Nvidia SuperPod AI supercomputer cluster, sparking speculation about its intended use. While officially touted for improving efficiency and handling complex machine learning workloads for tasks like fraud detection and understanding taxpayer behavior, the move comes amidst the Trump administration's push to leverage AI for streamlining government agencies, raising concerns about potential large-scale job cuts. This procurement may be linked to the Trump administration's "AI-first" agenda, aiming to replace human workers with machines and reduce the government workforce.

(theintercept.com)

Tech Job Cuts IRS

Apple's Privacy Policy Under Fire: German Regulator Investigates Double Standard

2025-02-14

Apple's Privacy Policy Under Fire: German Regulator Investigates Double Standard

Germany's competition watchdog is investigating Apple's App Tracking Transparency framework (ATTF), alleging a double standard. While Apple enforces strict user data consent rules on third-party developers, the investigation suggests Apple exempts itself, leveraging its vast ecosystem (App Store, Apple ID, connected devices) to collect user data for advertising purposes with less stringent consent requirements. This disparity in treatment, along with simpler consent dialogues for Apple's own apps compared to third-party apps, could constitute unfair competition. Apple has yet to respond.

(www.theregister.com)

Tech

German Hackers Expose Critical Flaws in Iridium Satellite System

2025-02-13

German Hackers Expose Critical Flaws in Iridium Satellite System

German white hat hackers recently demonstrated the interception of text messages sent via the US Iridium satellite communication system, pinpointing users' locations within approximately 4 kilometers. Using readily available equipment—a commercial Iridium antenna, software-defined radio receiver, and a standard computer—they intercepted messages and location data, including those of German Foreign Office employees. The vulnerability stems from weak encryption in older Iridium satellite models. While Iridium has launched a more secure second-generation constellation, many civilian devices still use the unencrypted legacy protocol, exposing tens or even hundreds of thousands of users to significant risks. This highlights the critical importance of satellite communication security and the dangers of relying on outdated, insecure protocols.

(spectrum.ieee.org)

Tech

SAVE Act: Protecting Voter Eligibility or Creating Barriers?

2025-02-13

SAVE Act: Protecting Voter Eligibility or Creating Barriers?

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, reintroduced by Texas Republican Representative Chip Roy, aims to strengthen voter eligibility verification by requiring in-person documentation of citizenship. However, critics argue it inadvertently creates significant hurdles for millions of married women whose names don't match their birth certificates. While proponents claim it combats non-citizen voting, opponents highlight the unnecessary barriers and potential disproportionate impact on minority voters. The act's passage would profoundly affect the US electoral system, sparking debate on balancing voting rights with voter verification.

(www.newsweek.com)

Misc voting rights voter eligibility SAVE Act

Yash: A New Shell Aiming for Ultimate POSIX Compliance

2025-02-15

Yash: A New Shell Aiming for Ultimate POSIX Compliance

Yash is a POSIX-compliant command-line shell written in C99, striving for ultimate POSIX compliance. It boasts features like global aliases, arrays, various redirection methods, brace expansion, extended globbing, fractional arithmetic, command completion, and command prediction. Maintained on GitHub, Yash largely conforms to POSIX.1-2008 and receives regular maintenance updates. It builds and runs on various POSIX environments, primarily tested on Fedora, macOS, and Cygwin. Post-installation, users can customize environment variables, aliases, prompts, and more through configuration files.

(github.com)

Development Command-line

Netflix Accidentally Adds Content to Apple TV App, Then Quickly Removes It

2025-02-14

Netflix Accidentally Adds Content to Apple TV App, Then Quickly Removes It

On Thursday, Netflix accidentally added some of its content to the Apple TV app, sparking online excitement and speculation. However, a Netflix spokesperson confirmed it was an error and the content has since been removed. While briefly available, the content primarily consisted of Netflix originals like Stranger Things and The Crown, but suffered from significant bugs. Features such as incomplete seasons, broken watchlists, and unreliable 'Continue Watching' functionality were reported. The incident is speculated to be a result of an internal test gone public. For now, Netflix content remains exclusive to its own app.

(www.engadget.com)

Tech

How AI Knowledge Gaps and System Prompts Stifle Tech Adoption

2025-02-14

This article explores how the knowledge cutoffs and system prompt biases of AI models influence developer technology choices. Because AI models' training data lags, new technologies often lack timely support, leading developers to favor technologies better supported by AI tools, even if suboptimal. Furthermore, some AI models exhibit biases toward specific technologies (like React and Tailwind), sometimes overriding user instructions to convert code to their preferred technologies. This results in AI-influenced technology selection, hindering the adoption and development of new technologies. The author suggests that AI companies should increase transparency, disclosing model biases to avoid negatively influencing software development directions.

(vale.rocks)

Development AI bias

A Decade of Grief: Unbearable Loss

2025-02-14

A Decade of Grief: Unbearable Loss

Sixteen years ago today, the author's second daughter was born; ten years ago today, she died on her sixth birthday. The piece describes the author's reflections on this day, the day his daughter would have turned sixteen, a decade after her death. The author visits her grave and attends a final memorial service at Anshe Chesed Fairmount Temple, a place that held special meaning for her, before its closure adds another layer of sadness. The author confesses that a decade later, the pain of losing his daughter persists, and the guilt of feeling he 'failed his child in the most fundamental way' remains.

(meyerweb.com)

Misc loss

Fly.io's GPU Gamble: A Post-Mortem

2025-02-14

Fly.io's GPU Gamble: A Post-Mortem

Fly.io attempted to integrate GPUs into its public cloud, aiming to provide users with AI/ML inference capabilities. However, the project ultimately failed. Several key reasons are highlighted: developers' overwhelming preference for LLM APIs over GPUs, Nvidia driver support limitations hindering cost-effectiveness and flexibility, and significant security and hardware cost concerns. Despite the failure, Fly.io gained valuable lessons, emphasizing the importance of thorough market research before large-scale investments.

(fly.io)

Tech

Manhattan's Hardest-Working Font: The Mystery of Gorton

2025-02-14

Manhattan's Hardest-Working Font: The Mystery of Gorton

This article details the author's obsessive quest to uncover the story behind Gorton, a surprisingly ubiquitous yet unassuming font. Initially used with engraving machines, its rugged durability led to widespread adoption in diverse contexts, from keyboards to spacecraft. The author's years-long search, spanning countless miles and locations, reveals Gorton's century-long history, tracing its origins to a UK lens maker and its subsequent evolution through various iterations like Leroy. While far from perfect, Gorton's charm lies in its imperfections and enduring presence, solidifying its status as Manhattan's hardest-working font.

(aresluna.org)

Design design history

Massive US Govt Layoffs: AI-Driven Restructuring at GSA

2025-02-13

Massive US Govt Layoffs: AI-Driven Restructuring at GSA

Dozens of employees at the US General Services Administration's (GSA) Technology Transformation Services (TTS) were abruptly fired Wednesday afternoon, primarily probationary and short-term staff, including those from the Presidential Innovation Fellowship program. The layoffs are linked to GSA's transformation into a 'startup software company,' focusing on AI, automation, and data centralization. New GSA leadership aims to launch 'GSAi,' a custom generative AI chatbot, in the coming weeks and plans to sell over 500 federal buildings to cut costs. The move sparks debate on AI in government, workforce downsizing, and shifting workplace culture.

(www.wired.com)

Tech Government Layoffs AI Implementation Organizational Restructuring

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